[mythtv-users] What does Myth *really* require in terms ofwindowingr?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 07/26/06 12:44, Paul Wheeler wrote:

>On 7/26/06, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>One thing to that comes to mind on this discussion happens to me in my
>>line of work a lot being that I design graphics workstations for
>>medical imaging research. In my line of work the data set for a single
>>reading can be 1GB to 2 GB of data that needs to be loaded and
>>displayed on multiple ultra high resolution 2.5K x 2.0K monitors.
>>Since the data set is soo large compared to the software size (a few
>>megabytes) we have come to the conclusion that it's really pointless
>>to spend any large amount of time reducing the size of the code as it
>>is insignifigant. I believe the same applies here. How big is a
>>typical show compared to the size of the window manager itself? For me
>>I record at 2.2GB / hour.
>>    
>>
>Ah but what about a frontend that just plays recordings with a
>remote(different machine) backend that does all the recordings?
>

On my systems, XFree86 is about 150MiB (unstripped) and X.org is about 
256MiB (unstripped).  Therefore, assuming worst case of maybe 300MiB, 
that's about 15 minutes of a low-quality (i.e. VCR-quality) SDTV MPEG-2 
recording (at about 1.15GiB/hr including audio) or less than 10 minutes 
of a medium quality recording (at about 2GiB/hr including audio).  And, 
HDTV takes about 4-10GiB/hr (probably averaging about 7GiB/hr)  So, John 
is exactly right.  A few megabytes just doesn't matter on a system that 
processes multi-gigabyte recordings.

Sure, we could make it so the backend doesn't require X (by modifying 
Myth to use QT4, which doesn't depend on X), but why--so you can have 10 
extra minutes of recording time?  When Myth is modified to use QT4, it 
won't be to give you 10 minutes more recording time...

As far as removing the X dependency from the frontend, that's a whole 
other story (involving drivers for graphics cards, acceleration, etc.).

Look at it, also, from this standpoint...
  - A new 400GB HDD:  $145.45 ( 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014+103530113&Subcategory=14&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice= 
)
  - 300MiB of that HDD: $0.12
  - Time developers can spend making worthwhile changes to MythTV: priceless

(Yes, I did properly account for SI gigabytes versus binary mebibytes.)

Mike